[Manuscript, unpublished:] My Spectre Around Me. [The Dome of Glass, Volume One.]

Bookseller Notes

Berlin was an artist and sculptor, he had also once been a dancer, but his writings complex and idiosyncratic are a testament to the possibility that his life and personality were perhaps his most monumental work. This work, intended as the earliest volume of an autobiographical roman-fleuve, 'The Dome of Glass', was never published. Three other parts of the sequence were: 'Pride of the Peacock' (1972), 'I Am Lazarus' (1961), and 'The Dark Monarch' (1962) this last withdrawn and pulped after its publication prompted a flurry of libel cases from fellow artists in St Ives who recognised themselves in his savage portrait of the town. The present work describes the author's pre-history, his parents' life in London and his childhood there, as well as his formative years as an artist.Within the folder of letters present here, all relating to his original attempts to publish 'Spectre' in 1961, Berlin discusses that controversial work as being in progress ('a thing I am now working on called: THE DARK MONARCH, which is a study of evil') and apprises the publisher of 'I am Lazarus', Anthony Dent of the Galley Press, of his refusal to compromise in his vision of either the individual work or the whole sequence which has 'been planned for many years. If they come out arsey-varsey I don't think it matters'. The letters, and some portion of the original draft, were written when Berlin was living among gypsies at Lyndhurst in the New Forest (by the time of the later draft he is in the Isle of Wight, having divorced his second wife and married his third), and evince the combustible and uncompromising nature that had led to his departure from Cornwall: he insists to Dent, who had offered qualified praise but hesitancy over publication, that no part of the work can be changed, and that when the drawings to accompany the text come (a manuscript listing of them is present) they 'can become to SPECTRE what Tenniel became to Alice' (he elsewhere compares the work to Fielding's 'History of Tom Jones').